Leitu Bonnici

Leitu Bonnici is a graphic designer, filmmaker and artist that has lived and worked across Bunurong Boonwurrung, Wurundjeri Woiwurrung, Guringai, Dhurag and Kaurna Countries, but is currently based in Arnhem, Netherlands. She is of Sāmoan (Faleasi’u), Italian, Maltese, Irish, English and Swedish ancestry (among others). 

Through a wide range of methods in the intersections of graphic design, film, visual art, wearables, objects, experiences and more, her work challenges the entrenched frameworks that dictate the recording and distribution of information. She runs Le Phem Era, an interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary practice that critically examines ephemera through experimental forms of archiving and publishing. Research is conducted through creative analysis, datafication, disruption, re-assemblage and speculation using democratic modes of production.

Her commission will be an experimental and reflexive short film that is a hybrid of documentary and narrative, promoting visibility and reclamation of Sāmoan language. It will form a poetic talanoa, keeping to the spontaneous way conversation and interpersonal exchange unfolds. The work will be a part of the ongoing publishing project, ‘Afa‘afakasi, that reconnects to gagana Sāmoa through a critical, collaborative and playful approach. Rather than observing an organised system of language learning, the body of work explores how volumes can be interpreted in a variety of immersive forms, placing equal value on the process of learning as to the presentation of outcomes.

www.lephemera.com